"In Zimbabwe, Survival Lies in Scavenging
NZVERE, Zimbabwe — Along a road in Matabeleland, barefoot children stuff their pockets with corn kernels that have blown off a truck as if the brownish bits, good only for animal feed in normal times, were gold coins.( UNREAL )
In the dirt lanes of Chitungwiza, the Mugarwes, a family of firewood hawkers, bake a loaf of bread, their only meal, with 11 slices for the six of them. All devour two slices except the youngest, age 2. He gets just one.
And on the tiny farms here in the region of Mashonaland, once a breadbasket for all of southern Africa( SO SAD ), destitute villagers pull the shells off wriggling crickets and beetles, then toss what is left in a hot pan. “If you get that, you have a meal,” said Standford Nhira, a spectrally thin farmer whose rib cage is etched on his chest and whose socks have collapsed around his sticklike ankles.
The half-starved haunt the once bountiful landscape of Zimbabwe, where a recent United Nations survey found that 7 in 10 people had eaten either nothing or only a single meal the day before.( DEAR GOD )
Still dominated after nearly three decades by their authoritarian president( HE'S AMONG THE WORST RULERS EVER ), Robert Mugabe, Zimbabweans are now enduring their seventh straight year of hunger. This largely man-made crisis( TRUE ), occasionally worsened by drought and erratic rains, has been brought on by catastrophic agricultural policies( TRUE ), sweeping economic collapse and a ruling party that has used farmland and food as weapons in its ruthless — and so far successful — quest to hang on to power( SUCH A DISGRACE ).
But this year is different. This year, the hunger is much worse.
The survey conducted by the United Nations World Food Program in October found a shocking deterioration in the past year alone. The survey, recently provided to international donors, found that the proportion of people who had eaten nothing the previous day had risen to 12 percent from zero, while those who had consumed only one meal had soared to 60 percent from only 13 percent last year.
For almost three months, from June to August, Mr. Mugabe banned international charitable organizations from operating, depriving more than a million people of food and basic aid after the country had already suffered one of its worst harvests.
Mr. Mugabe defended( PEOPLE STARVING IS LESS IMPORTANT TO HIM THAN HIS STAYING IN POWER ) the suspension by arguing that some Western aid groups were backing his political rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, who bested him at the polls in March but withdrew before a June 27 runoff. But civic groups and analysts said Mr. Mugabe’s real motive was to clear rural areas of witnesses to his military-led crackdown on opposition supporters and to starve those supporters( OF COURSE ).
The country’s intertwined political and humanitarian crises have become ever more grave — with a cholera epidemic sweeping the nation, its health, education and sanitation systems in ruins and power-sharing talks at an impasse. Meanwhile, Mr. Mugabe has blamed Western sanctions, largely aimed at senior members of his government, for the country’s woes( UNREAL ).
His information minister even charged last week that Britain, Zimbabwe’s former colonial ruler, had started the cholera outbreak — spread by water contaminated with human feces — as an act of “biological chemical war force,” a charge widely derided as paranoid or cynical( DISGRACEFUL ).
But for all Mr. Mugabe’s venom toward the West, a central paradox rests at the heart of his long years in power. It was the failed policies of Mr. Mugabe and his party, ZANU-PF, including their calamitous seizure of commercial farms, that made this nation so utterly dependent on aid from the European and American donors he so reviles. And the same applies to Western leaders: Despite their scathing denunciations of him, it is their generous donations that have helped him survive by preventing outright famine among his people( A TOUGH CHOICE ).
“You’re acting to save lives, knowing that by doing so you are sustaining this government,” said one aid agency manager, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. “And unfortunately, ZANU-PF is good at exploiting this humanitarian imperative.”
American-financed charities and the World Food Program have been feeding millions of Zimbabweans since late 2002, at a cost of $1.25 billion over the years. After a slow start this year because of the aid suspension, the United States and the United Nations are feeding almost half of Zimbabwe’s population this month( UNREAL ).
But the World Food Program is short of nearly half the food needed for January, said Richard Lee, a spokesman.
“You’re not looking at mass starvation yet,” said Sarah Jacobs, of Save the Children, adding that without an urgent infusion of food, “we may be reporting an even scarier, more horrible situation by January.”
No food aid has reached the village of Jirira in Mashonaland, near Harare, the capital. So each morning, people rise before the sun and stumble from their huts, beneath the arching canopy of a starry sky, to fill metal pails with the small, foul-smelling hacha fruit. Those who arrive as dawn breaks find the fruit has already been picked clean.
The sweet, fibrous, yellow pulp of the fruit has become the staple of the villagers’ diet. The fruit is now infested with tiny brown worms. Nevertheless, the women peel it, crush it and soak it in water. Some of the worms float to the surface and can be skimmed off. The mashed ones they eat.
Parents search for other sources of food as well. Bengina Muchetu tries to quiet her 2-year-old daughter Makanaka’s pangs with a dish of tiny, boiled wild leaves.
Maidei Kunaka grinds the animal feed she earns in exchange for her labor on a nearby ostrich farm — an unappetizing amalgam of wheat, soy bean, sand and what she calls “green stuff” — to nourish her three children.
“It’s not tasty, but we at least have something in our stomachs,” she said.
Villagers around here date the onset of Zimbabwe’s decline to the year 2000. It was then that Mr. Mugabe first felt the sting of political defeat, when a referendum that would have given him greater executive powers was defeated.
He took his vengeance, unleashing veterans of Zimbabwe’s liberation war and gangs of youth to invade and occupy highly mechanized, white-owned commercial farms that were then the country’s largest employer and an engine of export earnings. In time, thousands of farms were taken over. Farm workers and their families — about 1 million people altogether — lost their jobs and homes, according to a 2008 study by Zimbabwean economists for the United Nations Development Program( THIS REMINDS ME OF STALIN ).
Land redistribution often turned into a land grab by the political elite, and frequently poor farmers who received land did not get necessary support. The annual harvest of corn, the main staple food, has fallen to about a third of its previous levels, the Development Program reported.
The narrow roads that threaded this part of Mashonaland used to be lined with beautifully tended farms, residents say. Now, much of the land is overgrown with grasses. Trees sprout in the fields.
In Nzvere, a group of scrawny men sat under a Musasa tree, rolling cigarettes in bits of newspaper and chewing over the central fact of life in rural Zimbabwe: It is impossible to make a living as a farmer anymore.
In the 1990s, these men said, they harvested a cornucopia of vegetables on their small farms and sold the surplus in Harare. Now their land doesn’t yield nearly as much. With the formerly white-owned, large-scale farms no longer productive, the economies of scale that kept prices low for hybrid seed and fertilizer are gone. These small farmers cannot afford the higher prices.
The dollars and cents of farming simply do not add up, they said. The government monopolizes the buying and selling of corn through the Grain Marketing Board. With inflation running officially at hundreds of millions of percent, anything the board pays them is worthless by the time they get it out of the bank.
The farm redistribution has done them no good, they said, instead benefiting those who helped the ruling party grab the land. Even when food aid has come, only those in the ruling party hierarchy have gotten any, the farmers said.
So they have become scavengers, living off the land and surviving on field mice and wild fruit, white ants and black beetles.
The story is much the same in Jirira. Hacha fruit has mostly sustained the villagers, but soon the season will be over. And then what? “Only God knows what will happen,” Gloria Mapisa, the mother of a 1-year-old girl, said.
The suffering is not limited to the countryside.
This month, the Mavambo Trust, a small charitable group that works in a suburb of Harare, had its Christmas party, with a lavish feast of cornmeal porridge, chicken, vegetables and soft drinks. It was ample for 250 children, but more than 500 showed up. As word spread, famished children arrived early in the morning to wait by the steaming, fragrant pots of food. “So many came we couldn’t even shut the gates,” said Sister Michael Chiroodza, a Catholic nun.
Mavambo also runs a daily lunchtime feeding program for children on the grounds of a Catholic church. One recent afternoon, Annah Chakaka drifted into the church courtyard with her orphaned grandsons, Bhekimuzi, 13, and Bekezela, 10. They had come to beg for cornmeal to take home.
The boys, their handsome faces chiseled by hunger, said they do little now but help their grandmother with chores — fetching water, washing clothes, sweeping the floor. That, and hunting for food. They usually walk three miles to a muhacha tree to collect its hacha fruit.
But on this morning, Mrs. Chakaka said it had been difficult to wake the boys. They just lay there, too weak to get up. “Today we were just too hungry to look for wild fruit,” she said.
They drifted from the church’s courtyard as they had come, empty-handed."
We have to find effective ways to deal with leaders like Mugabe. I know it's tough, but we can't give up.
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